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Author Biography

Michelle M. Dowd is Hudson Strode Professor of English and Director for the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. Her publications include Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2009), which won the Sara A. Whaley Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association; The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Future of Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2025; co-authored with Lara Dodds), in addition to six co-edited volumes. Her articles on Shakespeare and on early modern women's writing have appeared in such journals as Criticism, Modern Language Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Modern Philology, Renaissance Drama, and Shakespeare Studies. Her latest book, Shakespeare and Work is forthcoming from Oxford University Press as part of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics Series. She is also editor of the book series, Strode Studies in Early Modern Literature and Culture, published by the University of Alabama Press.

Abstract

This essay considers how incorporating the critical study of affect into feminist formalist analyses can help move the field of early modern women’s writing forward in new and productive ways. After a brief historical and theoretical overview of the relationship between formalism and feminism in the study of early modern women’s writing, the essay turns to the specific topic of genre and affect. Reading the affective registers of literary genre, which often requires reading across traditional period divides, can productively enable us to deepen our understanding of early modern women’s forms. However, turning our critical eye to our own affective responses and priorities as scholars is also a necessary component of such analysis. Genres create affective experiences, but our own affect as scholars and teachers also influences our assessment of literary genres and the narratives we tell about the past. Critical assessment of form and genre, in other words, is itself an affective endeavor. Drawing on examples from seventeenth-century Englishwomen’s elegies, this essay sketches out some possibilities for enriching our feminist formalist analysis of early modern women’s writing by attending to both textual and critical affect.

Keywords

affect, women's writing, elegy, genre, race

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